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Employee Learning Should Be Varied, Tracked

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Aug. 9 — Employee learning is increasingly critical in this era of talent shortages, but employers
must train in varied formats and carefully track and analyze the results for maximum
business impact, consultants agree.

To keep up with rapidly changing business conditions, “we really have to learn how
to learn at speed,” Rusty Lindquist, vice president of human capital management strategy
at Lindon, Utah-based HR software company BambooHR, said.

It's especially important to “build strategies and interventions” for newly hired
employees “during the at-risk period” so they don’t quit, Mike Bollinger, global assistant
vice president of thought leadership and advisory services at Santa Monica, Calif.-based
talent management company Cornerstone OnDemand, said. Employees want to experience
career growth, and employers that give them that opportunity have a “propensity”
for better retention, he said.

When they are learning, employees want diverse content offered via video, audio and
text;
learning that's multilingual and multicultural; learning that's available on any device
at any time; and access to visual and tactile learning styles, Bollinger said.

High Performers Know How to Measure Training

There is a distinct difference in the quality of tracking and analyzing how and what
employees have learned between high-performing and low-performing organizations, David
Wentworth, principal learning analyst with the Delray Beach, Fla.-based consulting
firm Brandon Hall, said.

Based on a survey the company recently did, almost half (48 percent) of companies
say the need to gather metrics on learning in their organization comes from “the learning
function itself.” The problem is that this becomes a “siloed exercise,” with the results
staying within the learning function and not being relevant to the business as a whole,
Wentworth said.

The need to improve the effectiveness of the organization's learning programs is the
top driver of learning measurement, listed by 77.7 percent of respondents, he said.
“To more strongly link learning and organizational performance,”
or to link it with individual performance, were also popular answers
(65.6 and 52.8 percent, respectively).

But Wentworth added that only 37.9 percent said they are measuring learning to determine
the return-on-investment of learning programs. “Maybe ROI, the actual dollar value,
is less of a driver than we think it is,” he said.

Dissatisfaction with learning reporting stems less, in Wentworth’s view, from the
technology being used and more from a lack of strategy in the reporting, which is
a problem for everybody but the highest performing organizations.

A significant proportion of high-performing organizations (27.9 percent) say “we measure
the majority of our learning across a variety of metrics and use this data to improve
our learning strategy and delivery,” versus only 9.6 percent of low performers, Wentworth
said. Measuring the majority of learning with a variety of metrics and using these
data to improve their learning strategy and delivery is something that nearly 12 percent
of high performers, but just 0.6 percent of low performers, reported doing, he said.

Less than half of low performers say they are effective or very effective even at
measuring the formal type of learning, versus 70.9 percent of high performers, a difference
that is even starker (though at lower overall levels)
for measurement of informal and experiential learning.

A Difference in Kind

According to Wentworth, high performers are also much more likely than low performers
to measure:

ability to reach the third and fourth levels of Kirkpatrick's well-known four-level
training effectiveness model (“the degree to which participants apply what they learned
during training when they are back on the job” and “the degree to which targeted outcomes
occur as a result of the training event and subsequent reinforcement”);

whether the training meets corporate objectives;

managerial observations; and

ability to perform new tasks and assignments.

Moreover, high performers use different outcome measurements than low performers,
with 42 percent of the former but only 8.8 percent of the latter looking at team effectiveness,
for example. Low performers “basically don’t even think
[team effectiveness from learning] exists,” Wentworth said.

One example of a company that measures learning outcomes successfully, according to
Wentworth, is consumer product manufacturer Unilever, which developed a program that
“measured skills and competencies before and after learning, using multiple outcome-based
metrics.” As a result, the company was “able to draw correlations between skill development
and individual experiences,” get more accurate manager feedback and develop target
curriculums to improve performance.

An organization's measurement strategy should be an extension of a learning strategy
that’s “focused on performance as an outcome,” Wentworth said, adding that the entire
organization, especially business leaders, have to have input into this.

Many people think it’s too hard to measure the outcomes of informal learning, but
participation, satisfaction, assessments and business outcomes can be measured, just
as with formal learning programs, though some of the metrics for informal learning
are different, Wentworth said.

Lindquist and Bollinger were speaking during an Aug. 4 webinar sponsored by BambooHR.
Wentworth was speaking during an Aug. 9 webinar presented by Brandon Hall and sponsored
by Meridian Knowledge Solutions.

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